As part of the program, participating vendors are provided with blueprints
for achieving revenue-generating gateway to gateway and gatekeeper to
gatekeeper interoperability. Companies who have already signed on include
Alcatel, Analogic, Ascend, Cisco Systems, Clarent, Ericsson, Linkon, NetSpeak and Siemens.

The companies say while many firms claim they are H.323
compliant, they are not necessarily interoperable. To
facilitate the growth of IP telephony worldwide, carriers are demanding
that manufacturers quickly become interoperable to allow IP telephony calls
to be exchanged globally. iNOW is targeted toward companies looking to fuel
worldwide standardization.